Constructive - Represents systems which are user-defined, freely revisable, protean and indefinite and requires "a capability to act: to create, to change, and to recover particular encounters within the developing body of knowledge"; more complementary to print.

Deconstructive - Represents systems that create dissonance with existing print functions. Often characterized as nihilistic, deconstruction is a critical practice that emphasizes the contingency or "iterability" of any discourse. Process is dynamic and self-modifying. Objects are "texts" which may exist in multiple media and whose meaning emerge from their relationship to other texts. This deconstructive practice opens the prior text to further reassemblies or acts of linkage.

Exploratory - Represent closed systems in which users can follow various pathways through the network but cannot modify or expand the existing structure. Bolter conceives of the hypertext space as constructed by a single author, connecting texts, and images to external authors to be sure, but nevertheless suggesting and constraining the possibilities of the hypertextual readings.

Hyperrhetorical - Of or dealing with the rhetoric of hypertext. According to Stuart Moulthrop and other theorists, hypertext rhetoric must take into account more than just the ordering of language into structures and genres inherited from orality and print literacy. It must also address a more complicated meta-management in which the user modifies ordering processes themselves by searching or filtering, by building new links or webs, or perhaps even by rescripting control structures (Moulthrop).

Hypertext -Text composed of blocks of text and the electronic links that join them (Landow); a "topography" with paths through a virtual space where a reader is a traveler in that space (Bolter).

Instrumentality - How things operate as a function of human activity.

Interstitial - Relating to or situated in the interstices; situated within but not restricted to or characteristic of a particular organ or tissue -- used esp. of fibrous tissue; Interstice - a space that intervenes between things (Websters).

Interstitial Methodology - As defined by Ferrier, the interstitial methodology provides for agency within the interstices of boundaries by using the quilters' tactics of fragmentation, condensation, and juxtaposition as hyperrhetorical tools for a hypertext space.

Lexia - A meaningful linguistic or lexical unit. According to Roland Barthes, one lexia mobilizes different lexicons, or portions of the symbolic plane (of language) which corresponds to a body of practices and techniques. Thus the reading of the same lexia is read differently by individuals.

Liminal - Of or relating to a sensory threshold; barely perceptible (Websters). The "in-between" space of postmodern discourses that is valued for its unsettling, deconstructive potential (In A Concise Glossary of Feminist Theory, Sonya Andermahr, Terry Lovell, and Carol Wolkowitz, London: Arnold, 1997).

Mystory - A pedagogical form developed by Gregory Ulmer that uses a deconstructive process to compose a personal narrative using fragments of text, images, and video. The mystory uses the emotional sting of particular memories as the wormhole through which the writer travels to discover his or her "widescope" or guiding metaphors. The form provides access to a decentered space that places history within individual's stories or "distributed" memories.

Narrative Mapping - As described by Stephen Mamber, narrative mapping is a tool for dealing with the visual complexities of information. Mamber speaks of narrative mapping as an attempt to represent visually events that unfold over time. A visual information space is constructed that provides a formulation for complex activities.

Poesis- Within technologies, as described by Martin Heidegger, there is a point of revealing. The instrumental view of technology ushers forth an ordering toward what Heidegger calls a "standing reserve," a use view of the world. Heidegger poses that there is another path of revealing, that of poesis, that brings forth possibility rather than ordering toward standing reserve and is the saving power to confront the essential unfolding of technology.

Positivist - A theory that theology and metaphysics are earlier and imperfect modes of knowledge and that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations as verified by the empirical sciences (Websters)

Postfeminist - Parallels other 'post' compound concepts in focusing on culture and language in the adoption of what are seen as freely chosen identities, leading to the production of new kinds of texts which need to be read differently, esp. those of popular culture (Feminist Glossary).

Postmodern - A term coined by Jean-Francois Lyotard that labels certain features of contemporary Western society 'after modernity'; it is claimed as the successor to modernism in the arts; and finally it shares many elements of the philosophy of poststructuralism (Feminist Glossary).

Poststructuralism - The term designates not a single approach, but a range of overlapping positions: Jacques Derrida's deconstruction; Julia Kristeva and the semiotic; Michel Foucault's theory of power and discourse; Gilles Deleuze and many others, all of whom are in some sense 'after' the structuralism they had in many cases helped forge. It rejects epistemological privilege to scientific discourse over all others; eschews the metaphor of depth and surface and causal primacy to the former; it rejects the search for guarantees of discursive truth, whether in the world itself or in the protocols of science (Feminist Glossary).

Rhizomatic - Mass of roots distinguished from a true root in possessing buds and nodes (Websters). Branching system with no central authority or node.

Situated Knowledge - Localized, place-based knowledge. As defined by Donna Haraway, situated knowledge is partial and locatable rather than transcendent.

Synecdoche - A figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole, the whole for a part, the species for the genus, the genus for the species, or the name of a material for the thing made (Webster).

Techne - Techne is described by Heidegger as the activities and skills of the craftsman and the activities and skills of the arts of the mind and the fine arts. "Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poesis; it is something poetic," says Heidegger (318).

Technology - Stems from the Greek tecknikon and means that which belongs to techne. Heidegger further defines techne as the activities and skills of the craftsman and the activities and skills of the arts of the mind and the fine arts. "Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poesis; it is something poetic," says Heidegger (318).

Quotidian - Occuring every day, belonging to each day; ordinary, commonplace (Websters)